Existing User

Pia Arke, Scoresbysund, 1995, appropriated slide (original found in the artist’s archive of a black-and-white photograph of her mother, c.1947). Courtesy Søren Arke Petersen and the Estate of Pia Arke, Copenhagen

‘Sorrow and happiness wander together!’We readily could appropriate these wordswhen we met the East Greenlanders.We were happy to have reached them, yet,undeniably, also saddened to see them;for they did not appear as the unspoiled peoplewe had hoped to find! They were already ‘civilised’;

Footnotes

The full version of this essay appears in Pia Arke, Etnoæstetik / Ethno-Aesthetics, Copenhagen: ARK, Pia Arke Selskabet and Kuratorisk Aktion, 2010. The essay constitutes Arke’s 1995 graduate thesis and was originally published under the title ‘Etnoæstetik’ in ARK, no.17, 1995.
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